Chapter 3: Design and Implementation

Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month

As the quotation from Brooks’s classic book suggests, the design of the data structures is the central decision in the creation of a program. Once the data structures are laid out, the algorithms tend to fall into place, and the coding is comparatively easy.

This point of view is oversimplified but not misleading. In the previous chapter we examined the basic data structures that are the building blocks of most programs. In this chapter we will combine such structures as we work through the ...

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